Excerpts from India Today: Independence Day special (15th Aug 2004)

Almost half of Indian homes have no electricity.
Two in three have no tap water and six out of 10 homes have no sanitation facilities.
There are only 48 doctors for every 100,000 people.
Every third Indian is illiterate.
90% of the 17 million homes in Bihar have no electricity.
Even if every couple decided to stop at two children, their population would overtake China's in ten years.
25 million children are born in India every year, which means one child is born every 1.26 seconds, the highest in the world.
Two-thirds of Mumbai are slums.
Delhi is crisscrossed with juggies (slums).
Chennai has little water and almost no power.
One in every five Indians has no Pucca roof.
India are short over 50 million houses.
India's slum population is estimated at 62 million and it is rising at 2 % every year.
Only 10 % of the 70 million people over 60 get a pension.
By 2020, the number of senior citizens with no pensions will rise to about 120 million.

Shrines in the middle of the road. Naked Sadhus in the waters of Kumbh Mela. A surfeit of gods. A multiplicity of beliefs. In the name of religion, anything goes. And there lies a problem. Why should traffic suffer just because faith requires a public display? Religious processions are used to make political statements and easily trigger riots. Religion has become big business. The Tirupathi temple's annual income from offering is Rs 300 crore. The Ramakrishna Mission makes Rs 150 crore. But not every one remembers their social obligations.

India is no place to be sick, or poor, or both. More than 26 million people cannot afford healthcare. Government hospitals attend to just a quarter of all medical complaints. India has 48 doctors for 100000 people.

By law now, education is the fundamental right of every child between the ages of six and 14. Still, only 31 % of children complete their education up to class X. One out of every four children does not go to school.

In India a woman is raped every hour. Even if a rape is proved, the sentence ranges from one to 10 years. Most convicts gets away with only three to four years of imprisonment. (Rape is worse than murder as the victim has to live with the humiliation.)

Of the three million premature deaths that occur each year worldwide due to air pollution, most are in India. Indeed if it were not for our lungs, there would be no place to confine pollution to. (70% of air pollution is due to vehicular emissions.)

120 million homes have no sanitation. The capacity of jails in India is 229713. The number of prisoners is 313635.

Holy they may be, but rivers are also harbingers of death. In Delhi alone, 630 million litres of untreated sewage flows into the Yamuna every day.

Begging is a crime, but so is not rehabilitating beggars. Last month the newspaper reported that an average beggar makes 450 to Rs 1000 a day. Whereas an ordinary labourer who works for 8 hours or more makes only 100 Rs a day and an average office employee Rs 200. ) Ten million children work and sleep on the streets every day. 50 children run away from home every day. Yet only Hindus are allowed to adopt.

At the national level, of 1028 million population, 828 million (80.5 per cent) have returned their religion as Hindus followed by 128 million (13.4 per cent) as Muslims 24 million (2.3 per cent) as Christians. 19 million (1.9 percent) follow Sikh religion 8 million (0.8 per cent) are Buddhists and 4.2 million (0.4 per cent) are Jains. 6.6 million belong to other religions and persuasions including tribal relgions. About 0.7 million have not stated their religion.

Literacy rate based on age of 7 and above: Jains is the highest with 94.1 per cent followed by Christians at 80.3 per cent. The national average is 64.8 per cent in which Hindus and Sikhs fare slightly better. Muslim literacy rate is 59.1 per cent while Buddhist have 72.7 per cent

India - a land with 1.06 billion people and 3.3 billion gods.

PRAY FOR INDIA. Compiled by P G Vargis www.pgv.com